The Cosmic Walk

This version of the Cosmic Walk traces Creation’s story in a
two-pronged approach:

a)Specific
Stages identified with a particular date, based on current scientific
knowledge.b)Specific
Energy-patterns that give shape and form to the unfolding story. I align
these energy-patterns with the seven charkas, enduring features of all
forms of embodied existence from the cosmos to organic creatures. In
this version of the Cosmic Story, I link the energy patterns with
specific dates simply as a way of naming and celebrating their
existence.

In most versions of the Cosmic Story, only
historically verified facts are cited. In this version I take the
liberty of combining “logos” and “mythos” scientific fact and
imaginative myth. I attribute equal importance to what I call the
“stages” and the “energy patterns.” Evolution and Creation require both.
Omit one, and the liberating power of the story is seriously
undermined.

In narrating the story, it is important that
participants have some experience of “walking the talk.” This can be
done more easily outdoor. For indoor versions, one can trace the story
with footsteps, or a long chord/string, or with a series of pictures
along corridor walls.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Welcome to Creation’s Story

1. 15 Billion Years Ago: From the
restless emptiness of quantum space, creative energy exploded, bearing
all matter, all dimension, all energy, and all time. The temperature
exceeded one trillion degrees centigrade, cooling sufficiently within
one-thousandth of a second to produce the first elementary particles:
electrons, protons and neutrons. The earth is still so radioactive from
this initial explosion that its core is kept hot by continuing nuclear
reactions, and all over its surface, many atoms are still exploding – in
rocks and trees, and even in our own bodies!

2. 14 Billion Years Ago: Cosmic dust
filled the creative vacuum, and still does to this day. Although
largely invisible to the human eye, the dust channels waves and
particles in the elegant dance of the sub-atomic world. The dust helps
to weave the intricate patterns without which the story would have
ceased billions of years ago.

3.
13 Billion Years Ago: The paradox of creation and destruction shapes
the evolving rhythms and patterns of the young universe. The cycle of
birth, death and rebirth became the inspiring process that would endow
creation for time immemorial. Chaotic and destructive at times, and
often baffling to the human mind, creation’s paradoxical wisdom
continues to beget the wonderful world we all inhabit.

4. 12 Billion Years Ago: The first
stars illuminate the enveloping horizon. Many of the early stars were
intensely hot. They flared up and exploded in brilliant supernovas, each
as bright as an entire galaxy. The force of those explosions sent
heavier elements hurtling through space, condensing over millions of new
stars, begetting in time the sun and planet earth. And to the stars we
owe the ingredients of carbon-based life, without which none of us could
savour the wonders of the night sky.

5. 11 Billion Years Ago: The seventh chakra, marking
the gift of LIGHT! We celebrate the resilience of the creative Spirit
weaving creation through the paradox of light and darkness, illuminating
the mystery through which all creation thrives, enlightening our
understanding of how creation works, and brightening our future with
hope and purpose.

6. 10
Billion Years Ago: The sixth chakra, marking the gift of WISDOM! We
celebrate the wisdom and intelligence which is innate to creation at
every level of its unfolding story, the well-spring which endows
everything in creation to act wisely for the good of the whole, and the
source from which human intelligence also emanates.

7. 9 Billion Years Ago: The fifth
chakra, marking the gift of COMMUNICATION. We celebrate creation’s
potential to relate and communicate, to articulate the richness of its
life and meaning – in a narrative imbued with complexity and wonder. Our
human capacity for speech and word belong to creation’s innate
potential to communicate and articulate meaning.

8. 8 Billion Years Ago: The fourth
chakra, celebrating IMMUNITY and the capacity for right relating. We
celebrate creation’s capacity for healthy and wholesome living,
facilitated through mutually enriching relationships with the diverse
creatures that constitute the canopy of universal life.

9. 7. Billion Years Ago: The third
chakra, marking the invitation to mutual EMPOWERMENT. We celebrate the
mutuality through which interdependence thrives, empowering every aspect
of creation towards the realisation of its true potential, liberating
freedom and hope for future possibility.

10. 6. Billion Years Ago: The second chakra, marking
GENERATIVITY and erotic birthing. In a creation of prodigious fertility
we celebrate the fruitfulness and creative abundance we see around us,
and we give thanks for the pleasures and joys of sexual intimacy.

11. 5. Billion Years Ago: The base
chakra, GROUNDING our presence in the earth and in the body. At every
level of creation energy begets form, and all form assumes embodied
presence. The cosmos, the galaxies, the earth, landscapes, persons, and
bacteria are all embodied expressions through which the presence of
living Spirit becomes grounded in creation.

12. 4.5 Billion Years Ago: Cosmogenesis irrupted in a
new range of supernova explosions releasing a spiralling cloud of gas ,
which we now call the Solar System. One spiral in this new irruption,
namely the Milky Way, was to become home to the planets and to the many
stars that illuminate our night skies.

13. 4 Billion Years Ago: The Sun ingratiates creation.
Born out of an explosion of 10,000 stars all at once, with a volume one
million times that of our earth, the sun is earth’s primary source of
heat and energy, of nourishment and vitality, for all earth’s creatures.
Through the process of photosynthesis, the sun’s energy enters the
food-chain, gracing every organism with nurturing abundance.

14. 3.8 Billion Years Ago: Our home
planet, the Earth, is born. Uniquely poised relative to the sun’s
influence on complex molecules, and endowed with a creative balance of
gravitational and electromagnetic forces, Earth brings forth
cosmo-genetic powers unknown in any other region of creation. Home today
to millions of species, the Earth seems to be endowed with an infinite
capacity for innovation and creativity.

15. 3.5 Billion Years Ago: The rich array of cosmic
liquids and chemicals formed a new alliance, birthing forth the earliest
life-forms: tiny bacteria that thrive even to our time. And from these
simple organisms emerges the canopy of life-forms that adorns creation
today.

16. 350 Million
Years Ago: With flowers adorning the landscape, and trees towering
above the earth itself, plants on earth and fishes abounding in the
waters, the sea mammals move on to land, and the complexity of embodied
life reaches a new apex of elegance and beauty.

17. 7 Million Years Ago: Africa gives
birth to the Human Species. Evolving out of Africa humans inhabit the
entire planet, bringing forth new mental and spiritual powers through
which matter becomes conscious of itself. Evolution moves to a new
spiritual threshold with humans, as a young species, still struggling to
make sense of their awesome existence.

18. 39 Years Ago (1969):
Humans visit another planet for the first time. Glancing back from their
base on the moon, humans see the Earth as a blue-white pearl,
illuminated by the Sun. This iconic image has changed our perceptions
forever, inviting us to forego our addiction to power and reclaim our
place as cosmic-planetary creatures whose essential vocation is to treat
creation with the reverence and care it deserves.

Concluding Reflection:

"What is particularly striking is the
lack of repetition in the developing universe. The fireball that begins
the universe gives way to the galactic emergence and the first
generation of stars. The later generations of stars bring into being the
living planets with their own sequence of epochs, each differentiating
itself from the rest. Biological and human history, with the ever fresh
expressions of creativity, continue the differentiation of time from its
beginning. Indeed all 15 billion years form an epic that must be
viewed as a whole to understand its full meaning. This meaning is the
extravagance of the creative outpouring, where each being is given its
unique existence. At the heart of the universe is an outrageous bias for
the novel, for the unfurling of surprise in prodigious dimensions
throughout the vast range of existence."(Brian Swimme &
Thomas Berry, The Universe Story, p.74)